Monthly Archives: April 2017

Pet cats and dogs can remember the location of their food bowls and sometimes even how to perform tricks or find their way home. But just how good (or bad) are these fur balls at remembering the minutia of their days?

It depends on how useful those memories are to them, evolutionarily speaking, experts told Live Science.

Take free-roaming dogs, for example. About 75 percent of the world’s dogs aren’t pets and don’t live in human homes, said Monique Udell, an assistant professor of animal and rangeland sciences at Oregon State University. A memory that helps dogs excel at scavenging can help them survive on the streets, Udell said.

The Bronfman family looms large in Canadian lore, thanks to its ownership of Seagram Co. Ltd., which traces its roots to 1924. Seagram grew from a distilling company into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with stakes in the entertainment industry, before a failed merger in 2000 led to its unwinding.

Charles, son of founder Samuel, was born in 1931 and held multiple roles in the family firm, becoming co-chairman in 1986. Over the past few decades, he has focused on philanthropy; he co-founded Birthright Israel, spearheaded Heritage Minutes and started the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine in New York.

IT’S OFFICIAL: THE country’s top regulator of the internet wants to end net neutrality. Specifically, Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai plans to repeal changes that gave the agency the authority to enforce net neutrality protections—that is, rules requiring internet service providers to treat all internet traffic equally. But he won’t likely be able to do so without a big legal fight.

Over the past decade, China has emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the automotive universe. For most car makers, the Middle Kingdom is either first or second on its list of priorities. Thus, it is only fitting that the 2016-2017 auto show season would come to a conclusion in China’s most cosmopolitan city.

The Shanghai motor show presents Chinese consumers with an opportunity to see the latest and greatest offerings from around the world. At the same time, the world’s press has the chance to evaluate the newest developments from China’s growing contingent of automakers.

The 2017 Shanghai Auto Show is open to the public until April 28 at the National Exhibition and Convention Center.

The designers at Balenciaga must be big Ikea fans, because the French fashion house just unveiled a fancy new leather bag that looks strikingly like Ikea’s famous blue tote—though the price tag looks a whole lot different.

Balenciaga’s goes for $2,145. Ikea’s is just 99 cents.

This was too much comedy for Ikea to process silently. In Sweden, at the urging of its agency partner Acne, Ikea (via in-house shop Ikea Creative Shop) whipped up a print ad and a social post comically explaining to readers how to tell the difference between Balenciaga’s bag and Ikea’s.

“Boosting economic growth” is a bipartisan goal. In fact, both the 2016 presidential candidates mentioned some version of it on their campaign websites. One way to boost economic growth is to increase the number of people working, and one way to get more people working is to increase immigration. Economic evidence shows that, in addition to boosting economic growth, immigration leads to a positive impact on wages of native-born workers.

Evidence also suggests that immigration boosts innovation. A recent study by one of us looks at the effect of Jewish émigrés from Germany during World War II on American innovators and innovation. The study finds a significant increase in innovation—in fields entered by immigrants, there is a 30% increase in patents by domestic inventors. These benefits are driven at least in part by contacts between immigrants and native inventors. One of the mechanisms at play is that American inventors come into contact with new sets of ideas and methods that they then use for their own work.

Reeling from weeks of multiple public relations crises, Uber on Tuesday successfully changed the topic when it revealed its ambitions to use electrically-propelled flying vehicles to transport riders to their neighboring cities quickly and cheaply as soon as 2020.

Through this effort, which is called the Uber Elevate Network, the company envisions scenarios wherein commuters could fly from San Francisco to San Jose in just 15 minutes at the same kind of pricing they pay now for UberX rides of similar duration. Ultimately, the company hopes to reduce the pricing further by using autonomous flying vehicles.

While it might seem lighthearted and fun, kidding around with employees can have some pretty severe consequences on your workplace, new research suggests.

A study from the National University of Singapore found that bosses who joke around with their staff open the door for deviant behavior, which can range from being chronically late and ignoring their manager’s instructions to sharing confidential information and drinking alcohol on the job.

Let’s all be completely honest: neither of us likes to work, and our dream job would be to sleep all day while money is raining on from the sky. Unfortunately, since we live in the real world where we have to work for a living, we also need to make sure that we are as efficient as possible.

We all want to become better multi-taskers and finish our jobs faster (and better) than anyone else, so if you’re trying to figure out how exactly to do that, here are some tips to be efficient at work.